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Filed under J. D. Salinger revisited …

The most explicitly Buddhist of Salinger’s stories, the titular character here is a preternaturally wise child who is apparently some sort of Buddhist panjandrum who fell from grace and as a means of atonement was reincarnated into the body of an American (had he engaged in some somewhat less egregious behavior, his reincarnation would have been less of a punishment—perhaps some sort of insect).

As with any piece of fiction whose primary purpose is didactic, the story falls somewhat flat. I imagine that there are those who would read the conclusion in which Teddy meets his self-predicted death as a satisfying end to the story, but it felt too on the nose for me.

This is, to me, one of those stories that feels like a remnant of Salinger’s pre-New Yorker writing. Perhaps this is why it was declined by The New Yorker and instead appeared in Information World Review instead (it was, in fact, the last Salinger story that appeared outside the pages of The New Yorker). There continue to be some of Salinger’s religious concerns that would so deeply permeate the work to follow, but they are in many ways overwhelmed by the atmosphere of the story with every aspect of the setting and characters defined by a certain—can I say it?—squalor.

This is perhaps the oddest story in the collection. The other stories in the collection tend to follow a certain pattern but this one does not. We have a somewhat mysterious scenario with a man with a young woman apparently in his apartment for a romantic adventure which is interrupted by a phone call from an offstage character. The reader discovers the identity of the man and his caller over the course of the story, but the identity of the woman is never revealed. Instead, Salinger plays an interesting game in which he pushes the reader to believe that the woman is the caller’s wife. The story ends with the caller saying that his wife has just come home and the man abruptly ending the call. I can see two ways to interpret this: One is that the caller has realized where his wife is and is playing a mind game with the man in the room. The other is that the mind game is being played, not on the man, but on us the readers. I rather prefer that second interpretation, that Salinger is taking the conventions of a story like this and pushing the story in a completely unexpected direction.

This is, as far as I’m concerned, Salinger’s greatest title (and he has some mighty fine titles, especially once we get into the uncollected stories). The structure here is a bit unusual, With the first part being a first-peron recollection of the narrator’s meeting with the titular Esmé (and her younger brother Charles). Esmé is another of these precocious young people so common in Salinger’s fiction (as an aside, I can remember one of my high school English teachers pushing Salinger on us AP kids with the suggestion that we would identify with precisely these precocious youngsters. I passed on Salinger at the time, but when I did finally read Nine Stories, I was very much in a place to be precisely charmed by said characters). The second part shifts into a third-person present-tense narrative which is ostensibly the narrator relaying his wartime nervous breakdown in the aftermath of D-Day and the occupation of Europe leading to V-E day with as much “squalor” as possible. The depiction of PTSD (a term that wouldn’t exist until the 70s) in the story is expertly drawn and given the many parallels between the narrator and Salinger himself, it’s not a far stretch to assume that there are autobiographical recollections as part of the story.

Given the use of the left turn in several earlier stories in the collection, this shows in some ways a both stronger and weaker use. The opening section is far stronger than the openings of “A Perfect Day for BananaFish” or “Down by the Dinghy,” and does a better job of establishing the pre-PTSD character of the narrator, but the dramatic change in form of the narrative in the second half of the story feels a bit forced. Even so, I’m not entirely sure if it’s a problem or a good thing.

The first Glass family story without a Glass fatality. I found Salinger’s use of indirect storytelling reasonably effective here. Even though we’re never in the point of view of Lionel, we still manage to get a sense of the world through his eyes. The opening section of the novel, a conversation between two of the servants in the Tannenbaum household tells us a lot about Lionel without the reader even knowing who Sandra and Mrs Snell are discussing (I can imagine this being a source of great criticism if this story were introduced in a typical fiction workshop).

It seems that there’s a lot of structural parallelism with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” with the story beginning with a conversation between two characters (who disappear from the story later) about the protagonist before introducing a third character who will actually interact with the protagonist. In this instance, we have Lionel Tannenbaum standing in for Seymour Glass and Seymour’s sister Boo Boo standing in for the precocious Sybil Carpenter. Of course here, the roles of wise elder and precocious youngster have been reversed. The central concern of the protagonist here becomes more specific from the shallowness of the majority of people in “Bananafish” to Lionel’s sensitivity towards insults, in particular the fact that one of the maids called Lionel’s father a “big, sloppy kike” a phrase that Lionel doesn’t understand, but knows that it is derogatory. It’s possible to see Salinger incorporating ideas he learned from writing both “A Perfect Day for Bananfish” and “The Laughing Man” in this piece as his skills become still more polished.

In “The Laughing Man,” Salinger is telling his story while ostensibly telling a different one. It’s a great use of a narrative frame to illuminate his story in ways that wouldn’t be possible directly. We have a narrator relating memories of his nine-year-old self and not employing the understanding that the older self would have gained through adult experience.

Salinger spends six pages before Mary Hudson, the true subject of “The Laughing Man” makes any kind of appearance and that only as a picture in the bus. Her eventual arrival sparks one of those great Salinger bits of prose:

Offhand, I can remember seeing just three girls in my life who struck me as having unclassifiably great beauty at first sight. One was a thin girl in a black bathing suit who was having a lot of trouble putting up an orange umbrella at Jones Beach, circa 1936. The second was a girl aboard a Caribbean cruise ship in 1939, who threw her cigarette lighter at a porpoise. And the third was the Chief’s girl, Mary Hudson.

This is one of those Salinger stories that left me feeling, “huh?” There is the usual Salinger wit and sharp prose (certainly, this is one of my favorite titles for a Salinger story, even if the story itself is not completely satisfying). Wikipedia informs me that, “At the time of its publication, it confused yet nevertheless delighted its audience.” which is certainly a sentiment with which I can identify.

I’ll close these comments with my favorite sentence from the story:

Very probably, it was not part o the sofa vaudeville of a showoff but, rather, the private, exposed achievement of a young man who, at one time or another, might have tried shaving himself left-handed.

The story whose film adaptation is (at least nominally) the reason that there are no other films of Salinger works. The second of the Glass family stories, in this case with Walt Glass who appears only in recollection. Told almost entirely through dialog, it’s a good example of telling a story through indirection and omission. Again, Salinger shows a great knack for the excellent turn of phrase: “[They] were talking in the manner peculiar, probably limited, to former college roommates.”

Where the story felt awkward to me is in the inherent sexism of the situation. Not merely in that the female characters were tied into the roles dictated by 1950s American society, but that Salinger’s imagination cannot really have them push very hard against those limitations. Eloise’s life exists only through her relationships with her husband Lew and the haunting specter of Walt Glass who has Eloise metaphorically sleeping to one side of her bed just as her daughter left room for her imaginary friend.

This was the first story I ever taught, in a class on Zen Buddhism I took as an undergrad (everybody in the class taught some topic for half an hour). It’s been twenty-six years, at least, so I don’t really remember the details although I think I only assigned the middle section, the interaction between Seymour and Sybil. Coming back at the story, I find myself drawn into some of the masterful elements of craft in the story, particularly the first section which I’m pretty sure I did not teach all those years ago. The remarkable specificity of the opening paragraph with its “Ninety-seven New York advertising men” and the complete record of everything Muriel did while waiting for a long distance line to open so she could call her parents. The remarkable sentence, “She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing.” The oblique references to an earlier suicide attempt by Seymour which might have taken place with Muriel in the car with him, given her parents’ concern about “that funny business with the trees.” The whole thing is a beautiful piece of art.

I wonder about my idea back then that the story was to be read as a sort of Zen koan. The fact that Nine Stories itself employs the koan about one hand clapping as its epigram might seem like support to this idea, but I had my doubts even when I was teaching the story to my classmates and they continue now. It feels, in some ways, as if Seymour is almost a slightly more sophisticated version of Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda who employs Eastern mysticism as a sort of justification and explanation for his own depression, but who most likely has not reached the level of satori that he believes he has.

This is Salinger’s second story to appear in The New Yorker, following by a bit over a year, the uncollected “A Slight Rebellion Off Madison” which was incorporated into The Catcher in the Rye.

I stopped reading Salinger over twenty years ago because I found myself being overly influenced by is voice. I’ve decided that I’ve developed a sufficiently strong voice of my own as a writer that I can allow myself a chance to re-read Salinger. My plan is to read the published books from Catcher to Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters/Seymour an Introduction before revisiting the uncollected stories from “The Young Folks” to “Hapworth 16, 1924.”

I first read The Catcher in the Rye in one day on a Saturday suspension at the end of my senior year of high school in 1986. Along with reading the book, I wrote a short essay reflecting on the book, my experience of the Saturday suspension and a version of the facts (not especially accurately recounted) around the ditching the field trip that led to my suspension. High on Salinger’s prose, the prose I generated led the teacher for whom this was a final assignment declared it “the best piece of student writing he’d ever read.” This fine piece of writing is, of course, now lost to the ages.

I re-read the book a few times in the following decade as I became increasingly enthralled by Salinger’s writing, especially in my undergraduate years and my copy of the book with the maroon and yellow assassin cover has grown a bit fragile as a result, but this is the copy that I re-read (I was tempted to purchase a new copy before a recent vacation and gift it to my oldest nephew after a quick re-read, but I ended up sticking with my battered copy for the re-read, hoping that the trips to the playground with my kids and a book wouldn’t end with the book falling apart.

There’s a special pleasure in re-reading a book, hitting the familiar beats that memory is ready to serve back to you along with the surprises of forgotten corners of the book. I’d forgotten how long the book stayed at Pencey Prep and found myself impatient for the story to get to the New York chapters which had been the meat of the book for me in all my earlier reads. Everything carries a host of additional associations in my mind now. Ackley will be forever associated with one of my college English profs who, in a conversation in his office, made a strong point of the assonance between “Ackley” and “acne” which I took at the time as a bit of an insult aimed in my direction because of my own poor complexion.

I did find that the book’s rather abrupt termination was less satisfying to me now than it had been in the past. Catcher doesn’t really have much of a plot to begin with, being more a series of scenes and the pleasure in the book is in the voice more than anything else, but it still felt as if Salinger might have just run out of gas at book’s end and decided to just let it go.